Ramble on

I have a blank canvas problem. I’m way better at staying in flow when I have something to work through, so these days, the first thing I do is ramble.

I open Codex or Spiral, turn on Monologue (my preferred text-to-speech tool), and dump everything I can think of on the topic. Before Monologue, I never considered typing speed to be a bottleneck. My fingers move faster than the speed I shape ideas. But when I want to vomit a bunch of unstructured thoughts onto a canvas, they suddenly feel slow and error-prone.

Instead, I can start a task by talking through it to generate a transcript. Then I ask an agent to structure my ramblings (the other day, the agent responded with “Your brain dump is rich."—probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten from a robot!). This gives me a great starting point to really dig into the problem. Before I know it, I will have rewritten all that rambling into coherent a string of thought.

I still can’t shake the dystopian feeling of talking to my computer. But text-to-speech has made some tasks feel so natural, I almost can’t imagine working without it anymore.